On race-walking stupidity

Let me start with a warning. In the photo below one can see the 2023 world champions. They are great athletes. I am deeply convinced of this. Any critique I am raising concerning race-walking is not addressed at the athletes but at the discipline itself. The athletes compete within the rules set by the international instances. They train (very) hard and make sacrifices in order to reach the summit of their discipline. They have my unquestionable admiration. What I am criticising is the set of rules which allow for an unnatural sport to exist.

In 2018 World Athletics, in the name of men-women parity (while they steadfastly refuse to do anything about women's decathlon) decided to open the 50 km race-walking event to women. Women have been competing on that distance well before that date. On the World Athletics page with the best performances one finds the name of Sandra Brown with a 4:50:51 performance from 1991. The world record is held by Y. Lashmanova with 3:50:42. Inês Henriques won the first world title in 2017. 

However, after the proposal for the inclusion of the events in the Tokyo Olympics was rejected, the event was discontinued and World Athletics decided to revise the distances of the race-walking events. There have been several conflicting announcements on this point and most turned out to be inaccurate. 

The initial Paris Olympics athletics program did not contain any individual event. It was later revised so as to include the 20 km for both men and women. However, the 50 km has definitely disappeared. It was replaced by a relay event, for a mixed team of two, each athlete running two legs. Now, this is the interesting part. The IOC page talks about a marathon,i.e. a 42195 m race. But the program of the Paris Olympics announces a 35 km. 

When I wrote "each athlete running" in the paragraph just above I hesitated just a bit but then I decided to let it pass. After all, it is clear that all high-level race-walking involves running. And this is the reason why I am always criticising this unnatural discipline.  But here I am not going to pursue this line of criticism. Rather I would like to point out why the World Athletics choice of distances for the individual events, 20 and 35 km is absurd. 

First, compare last year's women's World Championships results. Do you remark something? 

Next, in my post on my choice of 2022 best athletes, I included A. Drisbioti who had won both the 20 and the 35 km in last year's Europeans. And this year both distances were won by the same athlete in the men's category (Álvaro Marín) and women's (Maria Pérez). Is that a simple coincidence? I do not think so. For me, this is a stupid choice of World Athletics. The two distances are too similar when it comes to the effort involved and an athlete can train perfectly and be in top shape for both. Had they chosen, say 10 and 35 km, the situation could have been different. It would be preferable to remove one distance altogether and keep just the longer one, perhaps even shortened to 30 km. 

But what would have been even better would be to forget altogether about race-walking.